You get your 4-year-old daughter a role in the big summer movie “Maleficent” – Disney’s latest take on the “Sleeping Beauty” legend but from the villain’s perspective – and all she has to do is chase a butterfly in a key scene. But the precocious young actress decides that this is the day she doesn’t want to chase a butterfly.

What’s a stage mother to do?

Well, if the stage mother is Angelina Jolie, she grabs a pole with a rubber ball attached to the end (the ball became a butterfly later through the magic of special effects) and desperately dances in circles to spark her daughter’s interest. Meanwhile, Daddy (Brad Pitt) stands on a fake cliff just out of camera range and makes faces to encourage his daughter.

Now THAT is something you don’t see every day from the world’s most glamorous couple.

Vivienne Marcheline Jolie-Pitt eventually completed her first screen role, and Mom and Dad stopped being anxious stage parents long enough to share a laugh.

“She did it, but she sure took her sweet time,” Jolie said with a chuckle.

Working with her daughter was something Jolie, 39, had never done before, just like playing a role in a live-action Disney movie was something she had never done before.

“Motherhood had a lot to do with why I accepted the role, but the artist in me felt it was good to do something bold, something I wasn’t comfortable with, something I hadn’t done before,” Jolie said. “I was a bit nervous to take her on. I don’t have a big theater voice. I don’t do things that are comedic. This was such a crazy idea – for me to be a fairy.”

In case you don’t remember the story from the 1959 animated Disney classic “Sleeping Beauty,” Maleficent was the evil fairy who cast a spell on a royal baby. According to the spell, Princess Aurora, upon her 16th birthday, would fall into a deep sleep from which she would never awaken. That is, unless she felt the kiss of true love.

Director Robert Stromberg (this is his first directorial effort, although he is the two-time Oscar-winning production designer behind “Avatar” and “Alice in Wonderland”) said he thought the out-of-the-box casting of Jolie as a Disney villain made perfect sense.

“The first time we met, it was at her house, and we spent the first hour talking about life while watching her kids play in the yard,” the director said. “At that moment, I saw the strength and beauty that was necessary for whoever played this character.

“The pleasant thing you discover is that she brings an emotional depth to the role, as well as a deep understanding of what the character should be.”

Elle Fanning plays Princess Aurora as a teenager, and the young actress confessed that she was intimidated about acting opposite Jolie.

“I was extremely nervous to meet her,” Fanning said. “You hear that name, and it’s like the most famous ever. You know exactly who she is and what she’s done. But she turned out to be the opposite of what I thought she’d be, which was a god.”

Fanning, the younger sister of Dakota Fanning, said her first meeting with Jolie, at Pinewood Studios in England, was an unexpected surprise. Fanning was being fitted for costumes, and word had spread that Jolie had arrived.

“I didn’t know I’d be meeting her that day, and all of a sudden, they’re saying, ‘She’s here, she’s here.’ The knot was growing in my stomach. I turned the corner and there she was. No horns or anything. She was wearing normal clothes, and she immediately gave me a giant hug and shook my shoulders. She said, ‘We’re going to have so much fun working together.’

“To have Angelina Jolie hug you right away was really impactful, but I still get butterflies when I see her. You see that intensity in photos and on the red carpet, but then you meet her, and she’s just a girl. We talked about normal girl things, like prom and stuff.”

Jolie, who said Maleficent has always been her favorite Disney character, felt a sense of responsibility to the Disney legend.

“Part of the thing with this role is that there’s no halfway,” Jolie explained. “You can’t kind of do it. You have to go fully into it and enjoy it. The original was done so well. Her voice was so great. The way she was animated was so perfect that I was so worried that I’d fail the original.”

As for how her daughter Vivienne ended up in the movie, Jolie, who also is executive producer on the film, said she had no choice but to cast her daughter after other professional actors recoiled at the sight of Jolie in costume, with horns and yellow eyes.

“Brad and I never wanted our kids to be actors. But we want them to be around film and to be a part of Mommy and Daddy’s life. We want them to have a good, healthy relationship with it.”

Jolie said Vivienne being cast “came about because there were kids who came to the set and I would walk up to them and say hi, and they’d start to cry. One child completely froze and then started to cry. I guess it was sheer terror. I felt so bad but we realized that we’d never find a 4- or 5-year-old who could be strong enough not to see me as a monster.

“Suddenly, there was Viv running around looking like little Aurora, and everybody kind of thought the answer’s right there. But first I had to go home and talk to Dad. It’s our kids, and the idea is so cute to us as Mommy and Daddy. But we want them to do it for fun. When they get older and decide to do it, I ask that it not be the center of their lives. It can be an aspect of their lives but they also must do many other things in their lives. I don’t think (acting) is a healthy focus.”

Jolie said she isn’t sure she would have accepted the role 10 years ago, or even five, but the timing was right now, mainly because she had just finished directing her second movie.

The first was the dark and disturbing 2011 film “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” an account of the bloody civil war in the former Yugoslavia. Although it was a low-budget movie, it stirred up considerable controversy over its depiction of war atrocities.

Her second film is “Unbroken,” which is scheduled for a Christmas release and tells the story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who became a World War II hero.

“The new movie was so much more daunting than the first. It was so much bigger. ‘Blood and Honey’ was shot in a few rooms. In ‘Unbroken,’ we had two plane crashes, shark attacks, 47 days at sea, three prison camps and the 1936 Olympics,” Jolie said. “There were days that I wasn’t sure we could accomplish it all.”

Jolie, who hasn’t acted in a live-action film since 2010 (“The Tourist” and “Salt”), said she was so exhausted after directing “Unbroken” that she wasn’t sure she ever wanted to act again. But then she read the script for “Maleficent,” which she said was one of the best she’s read in years.

“The movie has an important story to tell, and it was a chance to make something my children could see,” Jolie said. “I loved playing her, and I would play her again if someone asked. It’s hard to know if this will be a movie that will last. You just never know about these things. You never know if what you intended comes across. But I’m proud that we made a movie for children that makes them think.”

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